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A
Phoenix FBI agent's request for a canvass of U.S. flight schools for
al Qaeda terrorists was formally rejected within several weeks of his
July 10 memo, after mid-level officials at FBI headquarters determined
they did not have the manpower to carry out the task, sources familiar
with the memo said yesterday.

The
request was forwarded to counterterrorism chiefs at FBI headquarters
and the New York field office, but one of the terrorism units in Washington
decided by early August that the document's suggestions were largely
unworkable in the midst of more immediate cases, sources said.

Officials
had previously been unclear about when and how the suggestion was abandoned.
But officials now acknowledge that the request was quickly marked "closed,"
and plans to pursue it were postponed indefinitely.

The
abrupt halt underscores the low priority that FBI officials assigned
to the five-page memo from Phoenix agent Kenneth Williams, which was
not distributed beyond FBI middle management prior to the Sept. 11 terror
attacks and was viewed as largely speculative by those who reviewed
it.

The
Phoenix memo is now at the center of heated debate on Capitol Hill about
whether the government misread warning signs about the intentions of
Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network.

Williams,
41, a former SWAT team leader, joined FBI Director Robert S. Mueller
III yesterday for a classified briefing on the memo before the Senate
Judiciary Committee. He is expected to offer similar testimony as early
as today to a joint House-Senate intelligence committee investigating
the events leading up to Sept. 11, officials said.

The
FBI has publicly released only one paragraph of Williams's electronic
memo, which outlined his suggestion that "the FBI should accumulate
a listing of civil aviation universities/colleges around the country"
and "should discuss this matter with other elements of the U.S.
intelligence community."

The
Phoenix memo was never shared with the CIA or any other agency, officials
have said. Nor was it given in August to investigators in Minnesota,
where alleged Sept. 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui was first detained
after he raised suspicions at a flight school there.

"Even
to this day, no one seems to know who knew what and where critical information
went at FBI headquarters," Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) said
after meeting with Mueller and Williams yesterday. "They still
don't have answers to . . . why things fell apart before September 11."

The
memo, which updated about a dozen counterterrorism cases that Williams
was working, was approved by Williams's supervisor in Phoenix and transmitted
to the Radical Fundamentalist Unit, or RFU, within the bureau's counterterrorism
division.

A
copy was sent to the FBI's Osama bin Laden unit, because his name was
mentioned, and an informational copy went to the New York field office,
which has been the center of FBI expertise on terrorism, sources said.

One
paragraph in the summary said that eight Arabs who were the subjects
of Williams's investigation were students at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical
University in Prescott, Ariz., where they were enrolled in courses including
pilot training, aircraft mechanics and security.

Williams
suggested that the men, who were under investigation for suspected ties
to terrorists, might be a threat. He asked for an analysis of people
coming into the United States for aviation training and suggested requesting
help from the State Department and the Immigration and Naturalization
Service.

RFU
analysts decided that resources were stretched too thin at the time
to pursue such a plan. Officials said that the FBI counterterrorism
division was swamped with urgent matters, including a large volume of
intelligence reports indicating a possible attack, and the investigation
into the terrorist bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen.

When
the memo's existence was revealed two weeks ago, one law enforcement
official suggested that the FBI had been "seriously considering"
a plan to pursue Williams's suggestions at the time of the attacks.
But officials now acknowledge that was not the case.

"The
decision was made that this would be taken up at a later time when they
got through the crisis of the moment," one FBI official said. "There
had to be some closure, otherwise it just would remain pending."

The
memo was initially categorized as "routine," several sources
said, because there was no imminent threat or crime indicated in the
document. The other possible category is "urgent," officials
said.

Associates
said Williams is surprised by the furor his memo created. FBI officials,
including Mueller, have noted that none of the subjects named in the
memo has been connected by investigators to the Sept. 11 plot, sources
said.

Prior
to Sept. 11, the FBI did refer the list of names in the memo to the
CIA, which concluded that none appeared to have ties to al Qaeda, officials
have said. But Williams noted that one of the aviation students was
a radical Muslim who had a picture of bin Laden on his wall, while another
had made a phone call to a man linked to an al Qaeda associate.

Earlier
this month, after finally receiving a copy of the memo, the CIA determined
that at least two of the non-flight school students named in the document
have ties to al Qaeda based on intelligence gathered since the attacks.

Neither
Mueller nor Attorney General John D. Ashcroft learned of the Phoenix
memo until after the Sept. 11 attacks. White House press secretary Ari
Fleischer said that as of yesterday, President Bush still had not seen
it, but was briefed on it "in the last week or two.

"I
don't think anybody needed a memo after September 11th to know that
there were general suspicions that people were in flight schools,"
Fleischer said. "Everybody knew it, as a result of September 11th."

Also
yesterday, Ashcroft met for nearly an hour with the four lawmakers heading
the congressional Sept. 11 inquiry, which has been mired in internal
squabbling and hampered by some resistance from agencies. The Justice
Department has balked at turning over some records to Congress because
they could be used in future terrorism prosecutions.

Ashcroft
told the lawmakers that the Justice Department has provided 37 of 79
witnesses requested by the committee so far, and that seven more will
testify this week, a department official said. Ashcroft also told the
lawmakers that the department has handed over 9,000 pages of documents,
and has made 20,000 more available at a classified location within FBI
headquarters, the official said.

"The
information we need, we are going to get," House intelligence committee
Chairman Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.) said after meeting with Ashcroft.

(In
accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed
without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving
the included information for research and educational purposes.)

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